


A Toast

by Kian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awesome Peggy Carter, Bittersweet, Bucky Barnes Feels, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Peggy Carter Feels, Steve Falls From The Train, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 12:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3134819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kian/pseuds/Kian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had taken her more than an hour of dogging the Howlies’ footsteps all across the command station to get them to give him up, though they’d done it with pained attempts at smiles. </p><p>“Take care of him, ma’am,” Jones had entreated. She wasn’t sure how she might do that, but she’d promised — somehow — to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Toast

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to the themes of some of the Medal of Honor games and the first scene kept haunting me, so I wrote it. And then I had to write a bookend for it so that it wasn't just relentlessly depressing. So, yeah.
> 
> As ever, I do not have a beta, so please report all glaring issues to the front desk. And I promise I'm going to catch up through all twelve fics for the twelve days of Christmas series (the twelfth day was yesterday, le cringe); I was not expecting either the Spanish Inquisition or to catch the flu, but here we are.

She finds him in the bombed out wreckage of a pub she dimly remembers visiting long months before, when Ste— Captain Rogers had first been putting together his special unit of hand picked soldiers, the group that would eventually become known as the Howling Commandos.

His disappearance had not gone unnoticed, but it had been impossible to go looking for him before now. Not while the SSR is busy scrambling to both carry on its mission and launch an intensive rescue operation in the middle of a war, scouring hostile territory for a single needle. She knows — has seen the records — that there are men still out in those ranges from the Great War, never recovered, buried in ice.

_Recovery is a longshot, but the body may be preserved well enough that —_

She shakes away Howard’s suggestion of hope. Well enough to say goodbye is all she can bring herself to hope for. If hope is the word. There is a very real part of herself that cannot put stock in hope. Not anymore.

She thinks if there is anyone who better understands the treachery of hoping for more, it is the man seated at the table.

There is a poetry to it, that he comes here now. Before, they had both been whole and the battles — even the war — had seemed surmountable. Now, cradled in the decimated skeleton of London, there is no hope, no whole.

There is a bottle at his elbow, nearly empty; a glass by his hand, drained dry. His head is bowed, face hidden from view behind the fall of his hair. His hands are clenched fists on the tabletop, and with feet planted on the floor, the tremulous shake of his shoulders underneath the disheveled slump of his uniform is all the more apparent. She waits until he breathes before descending to him from the craggy street above. He hears her, but he keeps his face hidden while he collects himself.

The other men — the other Howlies — had been fierce in their protection of him, him in his blank-faced silence, the whole frantic journey back to England from the European Theater. The doctors approached, and Morita had scared them away again with language of such virulent imagination that they hadn’t dared draw near again. Officers and agents of every stripe and affiliation had crowded in, demanding answers, and been driven off again with violent promises of retribution.

Phillips had put a stop to the harassment, and had likewise been the only one allowed a chance to draw near enough to penetrate the ring of ever-attentive Howlies, though every insubordinate eye was upon him. Phillips had paused at his shoulder, worked his jaw as though to say something, but instead laid a hand on his soldier's arm just for a moment, before passing on his way to interrogate their prisoner.

It had taken her more than an hour of dogging the Howlies’ footsteps all across the command station to get them to give him up, though they’d done it with pained attempts at smiles.

“Take care of him, ma’am,” Jones had entreated. She wasn’t sure how she might do that, but she’d promised — somehow — to try.

“You know, I can’t get drunk anymore,” he says as he straightens up in his chair. “Whatever they did, it did that too. Can’t even —”

He breaks off, pours himself another glass from the dwindling bottle and slings it back. The glass thuds hard against the table as he drops it, careless.

“See? Nothin.’”

He smiles at her, a wide, hollow thing full of teeth and contorting in a rictus that speaks of shuttered tears.

“Sergeant Barnes,” she says. There is nothing that comes after that, her mind a perfect blank. Her throat closes and she clenches her jaw hard. She will be controlled. She will.

He looks at her, the grimace of his flawed showman’s grin dropping away into the tortured openness of despair.

“I let him go. Peggy, I couldn’t hold him. I just let —”

She’s across the room in a moment, grasping his head between her hands and curling in around him, his face buried into the wool covering her stomach as her arms wrap around his shoulders and her chin curls down into the whorl of hair at the back of his head. His arms wrap tight around her hips and he sobs once, a sound made only by the mortally wounded.

“You did nothing of the kind,” she spits fiercely, shaking him when she feels his denial shudder through him. “No one could have hoped to hold on like that, in those conditions. But if anyone could have held on to him — if it had been possible — it would have been you. And because it was you, I know that there was no way it could have been done.” It’s nonsense talk, but it’s all she has and so she growls it at him, not wanting his guilt, but his honest grief.

“Steve would’ve —”

She shakes him again, feels her own, first tears begin to fall into his hair.

“No,” she says. “No.”

“Oh god,” he gasps. “Oh god, why Steve? _Steve_ …”

“Because he loved you. Because he wanted you safe.”

“Not worth it.”

“To him, it was.”

The shaking goes on and she rides it out, letting her own grief get the better of her for these few vulnerable moments.

At length, he pulls back from her, and she makes a show of fetching herself a tall box to sit on at the table, and another unbroken bottle of scotch from its hiding place behind the bar. When she seats herself across from him, his face has been wiped clean, though his eyes are blotchy and reddened.

“He always was an idiot,” he says, trying to smile.

“So dramatic,” she replies in kind.

He tips his glass toward her and she pours. He waits for her to fill her own glass — wiped clean with the corner of her uniform — then lifts his high in a toast.

“To the Captain,” he says, voice trembling.

“To Steve,” she corrects.

“Steve.”

He throws back his glassful, and she follows suit, letting the alcohol burn her, down to where the coldness took root days before, deep behind her ribcage.

When she looks at the Sergeant again, his eyes are fierce with rage.

“When do we start?” 

* * *

He finds him in the copse of trees that shields the second memorial from immediate view of the first, seated across from the plaque that stands several feet forward from her statue. He remembers when those trees were freshly-planted saplings, and now they sway gently overhead, trunks thickened enough to provide a sheltering intimacy to those who venture into their sanctum.

She is captured just as she was in life: her sturdy grace, the secretive purse of her lips, the smart lines of her uniform and the tight curls of her hair. Still, to see her washed out in stone — the red bleached from her lips and the twinkle lost in the matte dull of her carven eye — is a lance through the chest that never stops hurting.

He glances at the plaque, reads again the lines he knows so well.

_Margaret “Peggy” Carter_

_April 9, 1919 — March 4, 1945_

They’d wanted to put her memorial as a footnote to Steve’s, but he hadn’t allowed it and neither had Howard, who had bankrolled her memorial and its upkeep from his own coffers when it had looked like the Powers That Be would balk at giving Peggy equal attention. What had finally clinched it was his own testimony that Steve would have wanted Peggy’s sacrifice to be recognized, in acknowledgment for being the savior of New York, his home city. There had still been some hemming and hawing, but on the day the Howling Commandos had gathered for the dedication of Steve’s memorial, they had also made their way down the little path to dedicate a memorial for Peggy Carter.

He sees that the shield has been left to lean at her feet while its owner has retreated to slump on one of the benches that form a half circle in front of the statue. He leaves the shield with Peggy and folds himself down next to Steve.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

Steve is still watching the statue, as though it might crack away and reveal the woman herself underneath, coming alive from its long winter by some magic or trick.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says, knowing the bend of Steve’s mood as surely as his own.

“I don’t know if that’s true. I made so many mistakes that day. Nearly lost you, got myself mostly killed, and then…”

“You respect her?” he asks, to break the train of thought more than anything else. “Peggy Carter. Your girl. Did you respect her?”

“Of course,” Steve sputters, confused and ready to be offended.

“Then you can’t blame yourself for her dying. You don’t get to take away from what she did, the sacrifice she made. And yeah, she made that choice because of you, but because she _believed_ in you and she knew that it was worth it. We all did, the moment we signed on. And seeing as _she_ signed _you_ on, you’d be some really special kind of jerk to not respect her choice.”

“I just...I don’t know what to do.”

“You do what she did,” he nods up at Peggy, smiles at her with all the love he has for her, even now. “You carry on. You keep going. Keep fighting, she would say, but I don’t think anyone would blame you if you decided you were ready to be done with that.”

“You kept fighting,” Steve says.

He nods, knocks his knee against Steve’s.

“I was angry, for a long time. And the only way to not let it eat me up inside was to keep fighting every bad guy I could get my hands on. Howard helped me find a way to do that, and the Howlies, for a while. It wasn’t always pretty, but I can’t say I mind anymore.”

“I don’t even know why they built one for me,” Steve sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Peggy was the one who saved the world. You, and the boys, too. I was just...”

“You were just the best of us.” He cuts Steve off, grabs his hand and grips hard. “You were our heart, the way we knew which way to go, the hope that we were going to come out the other side of the war in one piece. You were our Captain and I won’t let you say otherwise where Peggy can hear you.”

Steve smiles, a watery thing, while his eyes dart over Peggy’s statue.

He’s so battered, this Steve. The men who had found him had tortured him, kept him secret from all the people who had wanted to bring him home. They’d tried to make him a weapon, but when that had failed, they’d tried to pull the weapon out of him instead. It had been the terrible results of that shoddy handiwork that had brought them to the attention of Howard and Bucky, and that had, finally, brought Steve home, fifty years late, but no less wanted.

Bucky can hear Howard and young Tony squabbling as they make their way down the gravel path to Peggy’s statue. The Howlies’ and their families have already passed through and Bucky had promised they would catch up as soon as Steve was done making his peace. Leave it to the Starks to ruin a moment, though.

Steve wipes at his eyes, though one tear still traces a path across his cheek. Bucky watches him, drinks in the sight he suspects he will never have his fill of again. Steve feels the stare and turns to face him.

“What?” Steve asks, self-conscious. “What is it?”

“You won’t be alone, y’know. We were never going to leave you alone.”

Steve’s smile this time is a bit shy.

“I know,” he whispers hoarsely. “I loved you for it. I just wish I hadn’t taken so long to tell you. Either of you.”

“We knew,” he promises. “And you’re home now, so you’ll just have to make it up to us. Starting…”

He pulls a small flask from his pocket, twists open the cap.

“Oh, you know I can’t —”

“Neither can I, but we owe her a toast. To Agent Carter,” he says, lifting the flask up high.

“To Peggy,” Steve says.

“Peggy.”

He tips the flask to his lips, takes a generous swallow, and then turns to Steve where he waits his turn. There, in the sight of God and Peggy Carter, Bucky Barnes gives Steve Rogers the first of many welcome home kisses. 

* * *

end


End file.
